July 1, 2011

This Furby bend has been prompted by a workshop I’m running with SoundNetwork in Liverpool next week. The demo Furby I’ve previously taken along to these things seems to have come off the worse for wear, so I wanted a bent Furby that’s still within its protective layers. I also wanted to try something a little bit different to the ubiquitous push and toggle switches, so I experimented with conductive thread to see how that changed the experience of affecting through touch.

I’ve simply soldered two wires to the bend points, fed them out of a convenient hole in the back of the plastic shell, made a loop in the ends of them and sewn this loop to the inside of the fur with conductive thread.

After replacing the fur (I didn’t need to detach it fully, just open it up around the base and peel it up over the back so I could open the shell) I then sewed more thread to the points where the wires were attached.

Many thanks to Kit Larks and Lynne Bruning for supplying the raw materials.

A dozen people, three projects to introduce you to the basics of circuit bending, all the tools and components you’ll need, a possible guest furby and definite cake. SoundNetwork have been kind enough to subsidise the ticket price, so all this for only £25. Quite frankly, that’s a bargain!

Most of the people who came along for the day had no or minimal experience with soldering, so we started off with a quick introduction to the basics before getting stuck into the circuit bending projects. By project number three it was great to see everyone happy to just get on with it, even if several hours ago they’d never soldered before!

I didn’t get much chance to take photos etc, but fortunately the workshop was mostly self-documenting with various tweets, photos and audio recordings being uploaded as we went along.

Several hours later we had eaten all the snacks, had a good laugh, discussed the difficulties of bomb-making [Theatrical-Fake-Bomb-Units, that is), worked our way through all three projects and arrived at this aural treat expertly performed by The Nottingham Hackspace Unharmonic Orchestra. A thing of beauty!

November 2, 2010

All I can do is show people how to wire them up - I can't control what happens after that...

For several days now I’ve been saying what I’m really looking forward to with the Circuit Bending 101 workshops I’m running is the bit at the end where everyone will have a selection of tinkered-with electronic toys and the noise starts to issue forth.

Just as an experiment I thought I’d try and simulate what that might possibly sound like and recorded twelve individual segments of audio of about a minute in length.

I promise I was fully intending to try and combine these together in a vaguely musical manner, however when I imported all the audio and pressed play just to hear what I was starting with, I decided to leave things how they were.

There are a handful of places left for the workshops, so if you’d like your own spooky, glowy, maniacal laughter device you can make your own (along with the two other projects). I’ve had a couple of these in my flat for a month of two now and can vouch for it being an addictive toy at any time of year!

My main area of enquiry is centred around interactions between people and place: often using tools and strategies from areas such as pervasive games and physical computing to set up frameworks for exploration.

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